Sunday, May 12, 2013

The film was Looper, a 2012 sci-fi film written and directed by Rian Johnson —
whose first feature, Brick (2005), I’d
quite liked, so both Charles and I were looking forward to this one. It was a major disappointment, a surprisingly dull sci-fi thriller set in
Kansas in the year 2044. As the narrator and central character, Joe (Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt), economically explains to us at
the start, time travel hasn’t been invented in 2044 but by 2074, 30 years into
the future, it has been. Unfortunately, because of the obvious dangers involved
in having people rooting around the past and changing things in the future, it
was outlawed almost as soon as it was invented, so today the only people doing
time travel are the criminal syndicates which essentially govern the U.S. (and,
one gets the impression, the world — Rian Johnson isn’t especially interested
in backstory but the future in this movie is a typical modern-day dystopian one
in which civilization has essentially broken down, technological development
has stopped, and the law of the jungle rules again). In order to eliminate
their enemies without a trace, they send their victims back 30 years, where
they are killed, and their bodies incinerated, by “Loopers” — hired contract
killers who off them and then dump their bodies down a shaft to a waiting fire,
which consumes them. Thus, to the world of 2074, these people just disappear
and the syndicates who ordered their murders don’t have to be worried about any
tell-tale physical evidence linking them to the killings (though just what outside authority they’d have to worry about anyway is one
of the many aspects of Johnson’s story that remains ambiguous).

The catch in
being a Looper is that eventually the syndicate is going to decide to eliminate
you, so they send back your 30-years-older
incarnation from 2074 and you’re supposed to shoot yourself, then live out the
rest of your life on the gold pieces you’ve been paid, one for each previous
hit (the gold bars in the film are engraved with Chinese symbols — courtesy of
a weird production deal Johnson’s producers cut with the Chinese government to
film a flashback scene in Shanghai so the movie would be considered a Chinese
film, entitled to preferential distribution in China), until you reach the end
of the “loop” — the time you were sent back 30 years so you could kill
yourself. The plan starts to go awry when one Looper, Seth (Paul Dano, too fine
an actor to be wasted in so small a part), fails to kill his older incarnation
when he’s supposed to do so and is therefore marked for death himself. Joe
tries to hide him out, and later when Joe’s own older incarnation (Bruce
Willis) is sent back he can’t kill him,
either. From a confrontation scene at a local café where the 2044 version of
Joe is a regular (and where he practices French to a long-suffering waitress,
Beatrix [Tracie Thoms], even though his older version says he’d be better off
learning Mandarin instead — given China’s increasing importance to the world
economy, he probably would be, too), young Joe learns from old Joe that the
world of 2074 has been taken over by a mysterious man called the “Rainmaker”
who’s sending all the Loopers back to
be executed by their younger selves: he’s also managed to get the largest five
cities remaining in the U.S. under his control, and he somehow was able to do
that entirely on his own without any other people in his gang.

Just how that
happened isn’t explained until the end of the film — though Johnson is a good
enough screenwriter, with a well-developed enough knowledge of classic Hollywood
and its strategies, to have “planted” a clue. It seems that some people in this
dystopian future have developed what’s called the “TK Mutation,” an ability to
practice telekinesis which whatever authorities still existed (at times in
Johnson’s story the U.S. of 2044 seems to have a functioning government, at
other times it doesn’t) were hoping would lead to the development of real-life
super-heroes. Unfortunately, as far as anybody knew, the telekinesis properties
of the TK mutants were so limited that the mutation basically turned into a
gimmick horny TK straight guys used to pick up women: they would cause quarters
to float in mid-air about six inches above their hands and hope this impressed their targets enough so they’d get laid.
Young Joe ends up hiding out on a farm owned by a butch woman named Sara (Emily
Blunt) who’s by far the most interesting character in the dramatis personae (and Blunt plays her with an authority that eludes most of
the males in the cast). We meet her carrying a long gun and threatening to
shoot Joe, saying she’s already shot and killed three vagrants trying to
trespass on her property — the impression we get is that without much of a
functioning economy in this dystopian nightmare of a future, there are a lot of vagrants running around and anybody who does own property is going to have to defend it with firearms
(though if there isn’t an economy and a manufacturing infrastructure, where are
they getting the bullets from?) — though eventually young Joe talks her into
hiding him out. She has a son named Cid (Pierce Gagnon) — that’s how the first
name is spelled in the cast list on the film’s imdb.com page — whose age is
variously described as five or 10 (he looked about 8 to me; Pierce Gagnon’s
imdb.com page doesn’t mention his real age but his first credit was in 2010)
and who may be her natural child or who may be her late sister’s child. When
Cid was born Sara was leading a dissolute life full of drugs and casual sex
(meaning she has no idea who Cid’s father was) and she placed the baby with her
sister, who raised him until she was murdered, at least according to the
version of Cid’s origins we’re apparently supposed to believe — though Cid is convinced that the sister was
his real mother and it’s Sara who’s just a foster parent.

With both Joes alive
and running around the world of 2044, the Rainmaker back in 2074 organizes a
hit squad led by Abe (Jeff Daniels) to go back to 2044 and take them both out,
while the old Joe has hatched a plot of his own: now that he’s back in 2044 he
wants to find the Rainmaker and eliminate him while he’s still a child so he
never lives to take power and condemn all the Loopers to death by their own
hands. Old Joe has traced three children who may become the Rainmaker when (if)
they grow up, and Cid is one of them; in a spectacular action scene old Joe
takes out Abe’s entire hit squad — both Charles and I said at that point, “Now it looks like a Bruce Willis movie!” — and the climax
occurs at Sara’s farm, where it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Cid has the super-version of the TK mutation that was
being hoped for way back when in that other plot strand. The film turns into Carrie meets The Omen as
Cid vanquishes the remaining people who are trying to kill him by raising great
waves of soil and agricultural debris — and old Joe tries to shoot Cid but Sara
steps in front of him and takes the bullet himself. Then we learn that the last
minute or so is a precognition of events in the mind of young Joe, who decides
to short-circuit the future by shooting himself, thereby making old Joe
disappear (reminding us of the movie The Sixth Sense, another Bruce Willis film in which the famous surprise
gimmick was that Willis’s character had died at the beginning and thereafter
existed only in the mind of the kid played by Haley Joel Osment, who “saw dead
people”) and allowing Sara and Cid to get away, hopefully avoiding subjecting
Cid to the bitter traumas that send his mind off the rails and turned him into
the Rainmaker. (Yeah, right.) It seemed
odd that not long after we had watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman — another movie in which a powerful director’s talents
were wasted on a formulaic and rather silly story — we’d be watching another
movie in which a powerful director’s talents were wasted on a formulaic and more
than a bit silly story, though in this case (as I’m fond of saying whenever I’m
disappointed by a film in which the writer and director were the same person),
the director was also the writer and therefore had no one to blame but himself.

Looper has some of the characteristics
that made me like Brick so much —
including the love of picturesque incomprehensibility (Looper makes me even more convinced than Brick did that Blue Sunshine and Repo Man are
Rian Johnson’s all-time favorite films!) and references to old movies that for
once add richness to the tale instead of calling attention to the
writer-director’s cleverness (the club at which the Loopers watch strippers and
do a drug that’s administered as eyedrops is called La Belle Aurore — also the
name of the nightclub Humphrey Bogart’s character was running in Paris in the
flashback sequence of Casablanca, which
he fled with his piano player Sam [Dooley Wilson] before waiting in vain for
his girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman, to meet him at the train leaving the
Nazi-occupied city — and Emily Blunt’s character is clearly inspired by Sally
Field’s role in Places in the Heart),
as well as the sexual role reversal (in one scene Sara summons young Joe with
the alarm system — two toy frogs that croak when one of their bodies is pressed
— they’ve rigged up in case they’re in danger, only she calls him not because
she’s in danger but because she’s horny and wants him to fuck her) — but all
too much of it is dull and routine. Johnson’s love of powerful visuals and his
disinclination to make his movie make sense combine to produce an impressively
atmospheric movie but also a surprisingly staid one; for all the surprises
(especially at the end) a lot of the sequences are awfully predictable, and as much as I like Johnson’s style
the impression I get from Looper is
perhaps it’s time for him to try directing a movie based on a script he hasn’t written. It also doesn’t help that Joseph Gordon-Levitt
was plastered with prosthetic makeup in a vain attempt to make him look more like
the young Bruce Willis; he was a marvelously expressive actor in Brick (even though the plot of Brick, even more than that of Looper, required him to do little more than suffer) but here he
seems trying to fight his way through all the rubber on his face to communicate
any emotions at all.

What’s most interesting about Looper is less its aesthetic quality as a movie than its status
as a window into the Zeitgeist: it’s
one more story of the future that basically describes it as a sinister, brutal
place, one more indication that Americans have at least unconsciously accepted
that things aren’t going to get any
better in this country and the future is going to be very much like the
present, only more so: an ever-shrinking gang of ultra-rich people at the top
(though we never see any physical evidence of their existence) lording it over
an ever more impoverished mass population (if there were an Occupy movement in Looper’s version of 2044 its slogan would probably be, “We Are
the 99.9 Percent”), and the ever more impoverished masses basically accepting
the fact that they’re on their own, no government or social movement is going
to save them, and all they have to protect themselves against predators both
above and below them on the socioeconomic scale is their grit, determination
and (especially) guns. It’s an odd vision of the future for a country
historically known for its optimism, though it’s congenial both to the Left and
the Right — you can read it as the rich oppressing everyone else or as the
final confirmation of the radical-Right message that everyone’s on their own
and they can’t afford to trust anybody,
especially people below them with their
hands out — and it’s one that seems to dominate popular entertainment these
days, especially when popular entertainment bothers to consider what the future
will be like at all. The Hunger Games
was a much better movie than Looper
(and its novel was even better than the film!) but it and Wall-E come from the same place — as does Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s new movie (and a career boost for him after
the deserved flop of his Jack Reacher
film, for which Christopher Meloni would have been perfect and Cruise was
totally miscast): a dank, depressing, despairing vision of the future that
rules out both belief in and support of
the status quo and any hope that it
could ever get any better or that any movements for change have any hope of
improving things at all.